The Kills

By Richard House

(Picador; 1,003 pages; $35)

It's more than daunting to pick up this thousand-page novel about imperial and corporate corruption, duplicity and murder set in Iraq and a few other locations. It feels life threatening. One has separate and near-unique requirements of a book this long. Mine primarily happens to be that it's got to be at least as good as "The Recognitions," William Gaddis' 60-year old masterpiece about the counterfeit and the real (about 40 pages short of 1,000).

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that when it doesn't happen, when a book this long falls short of the daring and genius of even flawed but fascinating longer works - now I'm thinking of Don DeLillo's "Underworld" (about 850-some pages) - even the most dedicated professional reader might give in to the temptation to skim, to skip, to breeze through certain pages and parts. Mostly I did not give in. But what does Richard House's monstrously huge novel, "The Kills," give back if you stick with it?

To find out, you have to tackle four "books" in this one volume: "Sutler," "The Massive," "The Kill" and "The Hit." The first one opens in an isolated location in the Iraqi desert where an outside corporation known as HOSCO International operates a plant where all the waste of the occupying forces, from tin cans to artillery, arrives in trucks for destruction in five major burn pits, each "as long as a truck," we hear. "Inside the pits a mess of black glue and scorched semi-recognizable detritus: a freezer unit, gypsum boards, a bicycle frame, half-burned boxes and bags melded together, yet to properly burn, but mostly an uneven field of papery black and grey ash."

We become privy immediately to a many-handed plot by which one of the local managers of the burn pit installation, a man, as it turns out, of multiple identities and disguises, who on instruction from on high makes off with tens of millions of dollars, and a chase ensues in which corporate management, off in another country, seeks to recover all that cash - or get a piece of it. Initially, it seems to the reader that this might be a good thing, however the weight, heft, density and psychological and political and historical reality of the long, long game House is playing here. A literal chase novel! (Early on in which we hear about another novel, a thriller about murder in Naples - more in a moment.)

The pages soon move us out into the desert, which seems like a Beckettian waste land, oddly without any troops or jihadis, and then to the more heavily populated Iraqi-Turkish border, where some journalists spot the elusive fleeing manager with the big batch of cash. A few sequences then take us to the United States (and forgive me if these remain in my mind as nothing but a blur, but I suppose by this time I was fighting sleep, and losing). Then comes the second long section, "The Massive", as we return to the burn pits and the personnel left to cope there with the problems of theft, duplicity and mismanagement.

The novel takes a leap in the third section, carrying us to Naples where we witness the playing out of a situation with police investigators looking into the homicide that features as the centerpiece of the book we heard about in section one. Is this that novel itself? Maybe, maybe not. By this time I was suffering from so much narrative fatigue I didn't much care. And though I perked up a bit when reaching the final section in Naples again, and in Valletta on the island of Cyprus in what appears to be an allusion, if not homage, to Thomas Pynchon's novel "V," I soon fell back into the burn pit of my despair.

Although someone might see the entire massive affair here as suggestive of matters we're all familiar with, I found that at the sentence level the narrative was flat, and dull, and in imaginative terms more of a riff on a single theme than a full-blooded, full-fleshed response to what went on in Iraq over the many years of our occupation.

Did I get all this right? I can hardly believe I'm still standing, let alone understanding it all. I feel like one of the characters at the end of the fourth section, a woman named Rike, who's assaulted by a man who pulls a plastic bag over her head - well, actually, we get this in the ruinous passive voice, as in "Plastic is pulled over her head and tape binds the bag about her throat." The man "does this three times, then drops her and leaves. ... In the darkness Rike struggles to upright herself. She bites and struggles with the plastic, pokes a hole so she can breathe, then loses herself to panic until she is weak and breathless."